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This blog is one of my first explorations in using social software. Initially, in conjunction with my wiki it will follow my web 2.0 learning journey.

Sunday, 5 September 2010

"At Google, we support the education of families on how to stay safe online. That's why we've teamed up with online safety organization iKeepSafe to develop curriculum that educators can use in the classroom to teach what it means to be a responsible online citizen."

My comments:

I think I have listed this resource in a previous digital literacy or tools post. It is such a comprehensive resource, it is worth revisiting.

I have found it worthwhile signing up to the iKeepSafe newsletter also.

The study – Gender Expectations and Stereotype Threat – will be presented to the British Educational Research Association's conference tomorrow.The paper argues that teachers have lower expectations of boys than of girls and this belief fulfils itself throughout primary and secondary school.Girls' performance at school may be boosted by what they perceive to be their teachers' belief that they will achieve higher results and be more conscientious than boys, the academics claim. Boys may underachieve because they pick up on teachers' assumptions that they will obtain lower results than girls and have less drive."

With just a cursory glance this research warrants a good think by educators and parents.

Sunday, 15 August 2010

Today, I found some time to get back to this draft post. No more than a mishmash of links to articles on my favourite themes. These themes are easy to work out if you have a quick backward look at my posts.

Sunday, 27 June 2010

Teachers need to maintain the currency of their professional skills and knowledge to effectively evaluate websites in the context of online learning for students of various ages.

I am thinking of an expanded checklist of criteria beyond reliability, authenticity and so on.

Today, it is also about: service, product, free now, games, login, over 13, sharing functionailty, adult/mature content, violence, parent role and and many more too infrequently considered aspects of a website.

"Potentially objectionable" is a key concept to explore.

I am formulating further comments about the wide range of issues relevant for this post.

Sunday, 13 June 2010

Bianca Hewes at Davidson HS is doing some very thoughtful work, read professional learning with staff at the school. Her model, which is pushing the DE Revolution forward in an authentic way, is worth replicating

All things DER - an update for principals in the Hunter by the prolific and passionate Phillippa Cleaves.

This series looks like continuing for a while. Blog and twitterati always have something to say about teaching and learning. Again, this one is a bit of a mishmash of posts, links articles, I feel are relevant.

Thursday, 29 April 2010

A useful extract from: Curriculum Support for teaching in English 7-12. Volume 14, No.4, 2009

This overview is an extract from a segment in this publication relating to programming for Gifted and Talented students. It is in fact the template for effective programming for all students.

Curriculum design
"The design process should first specify what students are to achieve. The BOS syllabuses determine the scope and sequence of learning, and before a unit of work begins, teachers should decide how they will know whether students have achieved the outcomes. The syllabus outcomes are the minimum that students are expected to achieve, and can be modified or extended to meet the learning needs of gifted and talented students. If the outcomes are modified, the teaching and learning activities and assessment must also
be modified.

The second element of curriculum design is the NSW Quality Teaching (QT) model, which is a generalised model of pedagogy based on teacher effectiveness research (NSW Department of Education and Training, 2003). The dimensions of the QT model, Intellectual quality, Significance and Quality learning environment, need to be interpreted in the light of the needs and characteristics of gifted and talented students.

The third element of curriculum design is the use of curriculum models such as those of Bloom (1956), Maker (1982) and Williams (1993), which provide ideas for the modification of curriculum content, instruction, students’ products and learning environments to develop engaging and challenging activities. "

Saturday, 24 April 2010

This post includes thoughts on teaching practice, digital literacy and online safety. You may want to catch up with the previous post in this series of loosely related topics. I also have a series of posts with a focus on online safety.

Thursday, 22 April 2010

In my previous post, I introduced a number of excellent UK websites with numerous useful learning resources. You may want to explore these first. UK Learning Resources - So Many Gems
I have since done a little more exploring and found some more must-visit websites.

"Wolfram|Alpha is a free online computational knowledge engine that generates answers to questions in real time by doing computations on its own vast internal knowledge base."
Check out the educators page.

Saturday, 17 April 2010

ning social networking groups have been a favourite with educators for several years now.

There seems to be surprise, disbelief and even horror spreading among early adopters in the education community.

I wonder, do educators forget that these services and products belong to businesses? You have to make your money somewhere if a business is to be sustainable. Even Twitter has a business model ready to launch. Etherpad has been swallowed up by google.

Thursday, 15 April 2010

"The Austin, Texas-based New Media Consortium, in conjunction with the Washington-based Consortium for School Networking, released the second annual Horizon Report: The K-12 Edition Monday. The report is written by a board of international experts in educational technology who identify key trends and challenges facing K-12 ed-tech, as well as outline which technology trends are most likely to affect K-12 students in the next one to five years.

Not surprisingly, cloud computing and collaborative environments made the cut, with the experts predicting that both will be adopted into mainstream education within the next year. Game-based learning and mobile devices will be adopted within two to three years, the report says, and augmented reality as well as flexible displays are expected to be adopted within four to five years."

Now, click the title to check out the whole report.

What do you think about how this affects your teaching and professional learning?

Tuesday, 13 April 2010

Sue Waters posted this earlier in the year. It is a guest post by Kathleen McGeady.

Students needed to be skilled to make contributions to class blogs. Providing guidelines or scaffolds to ensure that student comments are of good quality is a starting point that will contribute much to student literacy development.

Blogging in class is about literacy and learning.

Particularly, at the secondary level, if students are to learn (content and skills) from having their own blogs, then the process needs to be scaffolded by each teacher to suit the learning outcomes of individual subjects or key learning areas.

A model reflecting the types of texts that students need to succeed in each subject will ensure maximum improvements in reading and writing skills.

"Our selection of the 10 most popular YouTube videos about the Web is of course based on page views. But we also filtered the results for videos that are most true to explaining the big-picture version of what the Web is. The selection includes some of the most creative ways the growth of the Web has ever been explained."

When evaluating websites, first recognise that websites today are not just static content.

Websites that involve media creation and sharing require thorough review. A checklist will require these basic requirements and risks to be assessed.

child protection - personal information security

age-eligibility requirements that may be hidden in lengthy documents

privacy relevant to age

duty of care - online bullying opportunities

data security - security of the enterprise's intellectual property

network security - security of access

location information - geo. services showing where people are

ungrouped objectionable content that cannot be effectively blocked

Browsers may not be aware that websites expose them to threats including: phishing, malware, spyware, viruses, botnets and many new techniques developed by criminals each day

So you want your students to play subject-related learning games ...A games website often has lots of games, many not useful for student learning. In fact, the website may be more designed to raise advertising revenue. Games on a website may redirect to different websites and this is often not obvious.

It is a professional responsibility of all teachers to be aware of these factors and keep up to date with the dynamic, unpredictable nature of an evolving internet

Thursday, 18 March 2010

Recently, jomcleaytweeted:Thanks to all who answered with their thoughts about twitter, some really good ideas. Now question is Twitter for classroom? Edmodo?

This tweet and many tweets and blog posts before have finally prompted me to comment on this issue.

Teachers have always reviewed and assessed the suitability of resources of any kind including websites before they use them in the classroom.

In the case of websites that offer login services, it is absolutely vital, that teachers use a checklist of criteria to assess each product or service, before they "direct" students to register or even use during school hours. Some of the critical issues include:

being very clear about what is suitable for the age-groups you teach

looking for interactive resources and adaptable lesson ideas from reputable sources. They are in no short supply for educators.

being fully aware of the risks of using a service website that may reduce the potential benefits

reading and understanding any age eligibility requirements in the Terms of Service or Privacy statements

understanding the opportunities for and implications of student "sharing" attached to all the features and functionality of service websites.

... a short list to start ...

Finally, these articles touch on some of the relevant issues for educators wanting to engage students with the most powerful content and social media services for learning across all subjects.

Monday, 15 February 2010

In NSW, public high schools, support for the Digital Education Revolution continues. The recently available "Principals' Digital Education Revolution Checklist", contains a section with this title and leads into " Student Induction: Digital Citizenship"

Step 1 - p4Is to ensure a clear understanding of and agreement to adhere to relevant DET policies including Online Communication Services:Acceptable Usage for School Students Policy and the Laptop User Charter. Specifically, students should be directed to the sections on: acceptable usage, privacy and confidentiality and copyright. A strong message is sent about a range of breaches and the consequences of breaching the Charter. The issues of privacy and the sharing of personal data and pictures of others without permission should also be discussed.

A range of "cybersafety" sites are referenced for further reading. p5 They should enable an interesting series of sessions to be developed for both staff and students.

There has been a great flurry of interest in this development. All teachers should be interested in how to make sure that school-based browsing is a sfe form encountering objectionable content as possible.

Here are some of the posts and articles.

YouTube Help provides us with Getting Started: Safety Mode and writes:"Safety Mode gives users the option to choose not to see mature content that they may find find offensive, even though it's not against our Community Guidelines. When you opt in to Safety Mode mode, videos with mature content or that have been age restricted will not show up in video search, related videos, playlists, shows and movies. While no filter is 100% accurate, we use community flagging, hide objectionable comments and porn image detection to identify and hide inappropriate content. Safety Mode on YouTube does not remove content from the site but rather keeps it off the page for users who opt in."

The flurry of literary and digital activity actually began when I started holidays on 18 December. First I finished a couple of "draft" posts that I had in the pipeline for a couple of months. Too busy to get it together.

My January posts consisted of :

Blog This! links to useful articles and posts.

Various reflections - mine and others.

Thoughts on effective teaching and professional learning

The language we use and words I would like to avoid

Several series of posts:

DERNSW- laptops for learning and "i" devices,

My School - improving achievement at home and around the world

IWB and related technology

I was pleased with what I achieved and will make a review of each month's learning a feature of my work.

Sunday, 31 January 2010

"There always seems to be a lot of talk about the need for more teachers to embrace “21st Century skills”. Of course, there’s a lot of discussion about what these “21st Century skills” actually are. Many people have debated and discussed this issue, asking the question of what exactly should today’s learners know in order to function in the “21st Century”.

I’m sure there are a whole lot of really good answers to these questions that dig deeply into effective pedagogy and the deeper philosophy of education. This post is not about those things."

This post stimulated some thinking on my part. I noted that Chris Betcher listed the following:

I can only agree with ONE of Chris' list and that is "learn to search". I have posted on this topic previously in many references to the effective use of the full power of google search.

His decision to include basic photo and video editing, use html editor and learn to think in hyperlinks does not match most skills that I would consider vital for effective teaching and professional learning in this the second decade of the 21st century.

I do not use the term " 21st century skills". That horizon is another 9 decades to live through and to my mind it is impossible to predict skills essential for 2020 living let alone 2090 living.

The points Aaron Eyler makes in this post have interested me for a while and I have a few thoughts of my own.

"I presented at a conference today on educational technology and had a ball doing it. I love talking with people about education and educational technology. I also love being provocative and providing others with interesting ways to conceptualize revolutions and ideas in education, which is why I am going to provide you with some information I shared with the attendees today: your kids know more than you."

My comments:First point, would be to ask: in response to the statement "your kids know more than you" - about what?

If it is about the latest "tech tool, gadget, widget or mobile phone ... well maybe and maybe not. If the response is maybe, then I say so what...

As a high school languages teacher, I am happy to be and needed to be the "sage on the stage" most if not all the time. I am not going to teach very effectively if I am not a content specialist.

I am a fan of direct, explicit instruction, coupled with inquiry and exploration as the basis for independent practice of what our students need to "learn about and learn to (do)" in each subject area.

My favourite social software tools

Social Media 4 A Learning Revolution

About Me

Learner, reader and collector.
I am an avid collector of things I like. I have clothing, household wares and furniture from the 50s to 80s. The pleasure is in the hunt and I regularly visit markets, op-shops and garage sales on the lookout for that new little treasure. My collections remain works in progress.